34 Time October 14, 2019
grate an elementary school that had previ-
ously been 95% white. It was a 40-minute
journey each way. She did not, at the time,
understand that she was a pawn in grown-
ups’ sociopolitical experimentation—a
lack of trauma that, she jokes, presents
a challenge in politics. “People are like,
‘Tell us your suffering, tell us how hard it
was,’ ” she says. “But I was raised by proud
people. I was raised to know and believe
we had everything we needed.”
It’s easy to see how this upbringing
shaped Harris’ standing as an outsider—
someone who had to convince others she
belonged, no matter where she was. But
she was the kind of outsider who was de-
termined to get inside. She was always
trying to find commonalities, even as
she was aware of the difficulty of mak-
ing herself understood in different con-
texts. “The reality is that when you are the
so-called minority,” she says, “you learn
many languages, necessarily.”
While others, including her own
mother and sister, a former American
Civil Liberties Union leader, sought to
protest and advocate from outside, Har-
ris worked to find her way into institu-
tions where no one like her had ever been
in charge. After graduating from Howard
University, the historically black college
in Washington, D.C., and the Univer-
sity of California’s Hastings College of
the Law, she became a prosecutor, first
at the DA’s office in Oakland’s Alameda
County and then in San Francisco. In
2003, when Harris announced she would
run for San Francisco DA against her
former boss, many of her liberal friends
balked. Lateefah Simon, who had worked
with Harris to get police and prosecutors
to treat underage girls in the sex trade as
victims rather than criminals, remembers
telling Harris she was disappointed by her
decision. But Harris was unfazed. “She’d
say, ‘Are you going to be outside all the
time with a bullhorn, or are you going to
be inside, deeply in the face of folks with
decisionmaking power?’ ” Simon remem-
bers. To Harris, Simon recalls, the way to
make change was not to protest the sys-
tem, but to take it over.Harris’ underdog campaign did bet-
ter than expected. Partly as a result of her
relationship with her former boyfriend
Willie Brown, the legendary California
politician who was then speaker of the
state assembly, Harris had cultivated a
strong fundraising base among the city’s
wealthy socialites. Brown, 30 years her
senior and technically still married, had
also appointed Harris to boards and intro-
duced her to his political network when
they were dating in the 1990s, sparking
accusations of nepotism.
But Harris’ campaign was also uniquely
her own. She put down her headquarters
in one of the city’s poorest black neighbor-
hoods, pounded the pavement and used
an ironing board as a standing desk. Sheran on a platform of restoring competence
to the bumbling department and relent-
lessly criticized the incumbent for his low
conviction rate for major crimes. She won
in a landslide.
The law is written in black and white,
but prosecutors have tremendous discre-
tion to shape the way it is applied. It’s a
prosecutor who decides to put sex work-
ers in jail while letting their customers
off. It’s a prosecutor who decides that
a white teenager who kills is a good kid
who deserves a second chance, but that
a black teenager who commits the same
crime is a predator who should be locked
up for life. It’s a prosecutor who often
decides that a woman who reports rape
just doesn’t seem believable, even when
there’s physical evidence. It was a prose-
cutor who decided, in 2008, that Jeffrey
Epstein deserved essentially house arrest
for the serial sexual abuse of dozens of
young women. Modern reformers seeking
to curtail mass incarceration increasingly
argue that no amount of policy reform
will fix a system whose decisionmak-
ers are vulnerable to certain blind spots.
When Harris took over as DA, Simon re-
members her pointing out all the framed
photos of past DAs along a wall. The por-
traits were all of white men until her face
appeared at the end of the line, a 40-year-
old black woman.
It would not be easy to bring a new
perspective inside the system. Just a few
months into her tenure as San Francisco
DA, a young gang member killed a San
Francisco cop in the same rough neigh-
borhood where she’d headquartered
her campaign. Harris, who had run on
her opposition to capital punishment,‘She’s in kind of ano- person’s-landin terms of havinga good base.’
—Larry Gerston, a political scientist at
San Jose State UniversityKAMALA’S
STORY
1965
Harris was born in 1964 in
Oakland to parents who had
both immigrated to the U.S.;
seen here with her mother and
paternal grandfather in Jamaica1970
Harris with her mother
and younger sister Maya,
outside of their Berkeley
apartment in 1970Early 1970s
Kamala with Maya,
who now serves
as chair for Harris’
presidential campaign